Climate, Conflict and Gender

Mary Robinson, founder of the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Change and chair of The Elders, the group of global leaders established by Nelson Mandela, is a passionate advocate for gender equality and action on climate change. She was the first woman President of Ireland, UN High Commission for Human Rights and the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Climate Change. On 5 July 2019 she spoke at an OSCE high-level discussion in Vienna on women as the victims and the heroes in the climate change crisis.  

You have done so many things in your life – what moved you then to become a passionate advocate for tackling climate change?

I’m the first to admit I came very late to climate change. When I served as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and was working on economic and social rights in African countries, it was a very direct human rights appeal. Because I was hearing from local people – significantly women, but not all women – who were talking about how impossible it was to understand what was going on and asking: “Is God punishing us?”  What they were saying was: “We don’t know when to sow, we don’t know when to harvest, we have long periods of drought followed by flash flooding, it destroys the schools,” and so on. These are the people that I wrote about in my book Climate Justice: Hope Resilience and the Fight for a Sustainable Future.

So my first take was to understand the human rights and gender dimensions. My second take was to read up on the science, and that really shocked me. It shocked me even more when we got the stark report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last October on the goal that was articulated in Paris of 1.5 degrees warming.  The report warned that there is a big difference between staying at 1.5 degrees and going up to 2 degrees. Because it’s at that point that really bad things happen: the coral reefs disappear, the Arctic ice pretty well disappears and the permafrost begins to melt seriously, putting up not only carbon but methane, which is much more dangerous than carbon. So the recommendation and advice of the scientists was that the whole world – not just the small island states – needs to not exceed 1.5 degrees; we all have to stay at that level.

The scientists say that means we must reduce carbon emissions by 45 per cent by 2030. We had 12 years last October – it’s 11 years now. And I don’t see the urgency. I don’t see that people are taking this seriously who should be. Carbon emissions actually went up last year, and they’re going up this year.

We’re seeing the impacts: we’re seeing the heat; we’re seeing the forest fires. We’re also seeing all of those tipping points coming more quickly. The Arctic is very worrying; Antarctica is very worrying. I’m going to Greenland in August and I’m told it could be the canary [warning sign of deadly danger] because the ice underneath seems to be melting even further and that would cause sea level rise.

Then we had another report last May about extinction of species – that we face massive extinction of species and have already seen great extinction – and it’s all because of manmade climate change. And yet, we don’t have the urgency.

How should this urgency translate into the work of the OSCE? 

I think that the OSCE as an organization primarily concerned with security in the region should be integrating more of an awareness of the science on climate change and the potential impacts on conflict.

What I feel very strongly now, is that because of those two reports and because you can’t negotiate with science – you’ve got to accept the recommendations of those who have studied and who advise us and warn us – because of that, it is no longer a case that the 2030 agenda is entirely voluntary or the Paris climate agreement almost voluntary. They have both become imperative – because of the science.  And we have to implement both, in full and with much more ambition.

We have a very real crisis. What does this mean for conflict? We are already seeing displacement of people because of droughts, because of severe flooding, because of heat. People can no longer live where they were living. That’s going to increasingly be the case. Water is going to be increasingly scarce. We’re going to see more and more conflict. It’s good that the Security Council of the United Nations is increasingly addressing climate change. There is a complete nexus. 

The more we recognize that we have an existential threat from climate change the more the security implications become self-evident and we have to increasingly make that connection. The OSCE should be unambiguously concerned to integrate climate into discussing conflicts – and have a strong gender dimension, because all three are so relevant.

How does climate change particularly affect women?

There are a lot of studies that show that women are disproportionately affected by any climate shocks, such as cyclones or floods, because they wear long skirts, they don’t climb trees, they hold their children together and they are killed - I think it’s 14 times more - in serious disasters than men.

Women and children are disproportionately killed. They are also affected because of their different social roles. It’s the women who have to put food on the table, it’s the women who have to go further for the water, it’s the women who have to cope with the stresses of undermining already quite deep poverty with that kind of shock and disaster, which they haven’t any resources to cope with.

And yet as I have learned it is – and my heroes are – the very women who are faced with something like this who have the courage and resilience to form a group, start from nothing, get the mini-credit, beg, put a group together, start planting trees, start doing things and build up their resilience.

They’re the main stories in my book. And I also have a podcast, called Mothers of Invention, where we interview extraordinary women around the world, mainly from the south, but a mixture of south and north in every podcast, and I’ve learned so much about what could be a very good feminist solution to this manmade problem.

What are some of the most inspiring examples you have seen of women responding to climate change?

Let me go through the examples in my book. The first person in the book is Constance Okollet from Uganda. Constance in 2009 realized that the rain that was coming was disproportionate and was going to affect the village, and it started to flood and she fled from her home, fled to higher ground quite a distance away. When they came back every house was destroyed; the school was destroyed; the only house with walls still standing was her home, and 26 people slept afterwards in that home with her, relatives who were worse off. And she formed a women’s group and tried to fight back.

I have two examples in the book from the United States, quite deliberately. One post-Hurricane Katrina, a hairdresser, Sharon Handshaw. I got to know Sharon in Copenhagen and she became friends with Constance – Constance called her “Mississippi girl”. What happened was, Sharon had her salon in East Biloxi, on the coast, and she was on the wrong side of the tracks, African-American. Her father was a local preacher, and her salon was a go-to place for women for their nails, for their hair, etc. And it was completely destroyed, her home was destroyed. She got a trailer to actually live in, provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency Reduction, but she had the same humiliating begging for food, begging for survival, basically, and then becoming more resilient.

The other American story is in Alaska, Patricia Cochran, who is a native Alaskan scientist, watching the erosion of seawater, watching the way in which villages are now going to have to move, but there’s no money providing for this, and talking as a scientist about what she has been perceiving over the years.

Another story is from northern Sweden: Jannie Staffansson, who is a reindeer farmer but also a graduate in Chemistry from Gothenburg University. I met her in Paris, she made a great speech, and I met her again in the European Parliament where she also spoke very well. She describes that the changes in temperature are very dangerous for the reindeers and the herders. Because what happens is the reindeers, when it’s cold and there’s snow, can smell the nourishment through many feet of snow and they dig and they feed themselves. But if the weather changes and it gets warmer and then changes again, you often have a thin sheet of ice on top of the snow underneath, and the reindeer can’t smell through the ice. So they go further and further and the herders go with them, and the reindeer fall through the thin ice and the herders also quite often are killed or just rescue themselves. That’s again a complete change in vulnerable communities.

Two years ago, when I was writing this book, it was almost necessary to search for vulnerable communities. Now I could into Spain and find forest fires, I could go to Sweden and find forest fires: the truth is, it’s no longer peripheral any more to the same extent. It’s becoming more mainstream, the devastation.